Mermaid.

chương 3

Seul

Seul has to admit that sometimes lowering his expectations leads him to better excitement. He was hoping for a mere adventure through a ruin full of trash, with a few bizarre objects of no use but adding to his collection when he found something interesting.

It’s a painting, protected behind a stark frame of metal and a layer of glass, unaffected by the touch of water. It stays face down on the floor as Seul swims into the room and calls for him as soon as he has a thorough look at the interior. He picks the painting up and examines it. The frame is made of metal, and for some reason he can’t put his fingers on it, it isn’t attacked by the rust. There isn’t any sunlight here, either. Seul doesn’t know why it can be that flashy, but it catches his attention.

He turns the frame to look at its front, only to see a blurry face. The glass did a tremendous job of preserving the painting inside, but it took several strikes and became scratched. Despite his wanting to see the face of whoever is drawn inside, Seul knows he can’t take the painting out of the glass. The moment the water touches it, it’s destroyed.
He can only tell that it’s a drawing of a man with black hair, probably a highborn. Seul doesn’t know a lot about the Earth, but he assumes that merpeople and humans are the same to the extent of monarchy and reverence. A higher bloodline deserves fancier jewelry, and the man in the painting is clad with many gold and treasures, all carved in such details that even stained glass fails to cover.

Nonetheless, he can’t bring himself to remove the painting, either. Not that he needs to pay any further attention to the human whose face he can’t see, but this may as well be his first intact object ever collected from a shipwreck, and although Seul’d like to be optimistic and think he may have the same encounter again, he wants to keep the painting as it is, as a tribute for this special occasion.
He takes a few more minutes staring at the painting, checking carefully the frame and the glass, consuming to memory the details of the man-made artifact. His fingers glide through the glazed surface, and his eyes stay on his own reflection, seeing his face hazily lurking in the undamaged patches of the glass, and wondering for the first time how he may appear in a human’s painting.

That’s when Seul sees it, a reflection of another being flashing swiftly like a hasty current, darker than the darkness. It’s merely a shadow cast by the unsettling water, but Seul’s instinct is alert. He can feel his skin jump, the same way it does any time Seul comes into contact with a living creature. He turns around almost immediately and finds himself facing a shadow.

What– or whoever it is, freezes as soon as Seul's eyes land on them as a drop of water turns to ice in the faraway seas of the North. It's silent and unmoving, but Seul can detect living signs underneath its still demeanor. He swallows and peers at it, showing no intention of backing down. He isn’t surprised to see the shadow remain in their spot. The shadow seems like it's been waiting to see him, and Seul just hands it the opportunity.

Seul doesn’t know what, or who, it is, and he has no explanation. It's a bit smaller than Seul, around the size of a fully grown mermaid, but he doesn't feel any similarity. It’s also too big and calm to be a sea creature – they should be either too small to attack or too vicious to stay where they are – so he discards any chance for the shadow to be anything of the sea.

But then he finds it even more mysterious because it is vividly alive. Seul may have little idea about the world of humans, but he knows the basics and one of them is that anything that needs a ship under them while going to the sea doesn't live longer than a few minutes underwater. The shipwreck has been there for a while, shorter than a mere person's life, but longer than those few minutes of a human's survival.

“What are you?” Seul asks, for the sake of asking. Something wise enough to sneak out on him and pause as he recognizes it instead of fleeing mindlessly is worth a try on communication.